What Neuropsychology Can Teach You About Mindset

What can neuropsychology tell us about mindset and how can it change our outlook on the future and the results we’re achieving?

Let’s back up. While we’ve all been quarantined away in our houses for the past 2+ months, I hope that you’ve realized what an opportunity this has been to spend some time working on ourselves and our businesses. There are quite a lot of things you might have considered- such as learning a new instrument, starting a totally new business, taking up a new hobby, exercising, catching up on the latest Netflix show- er, I mean educational podcast- maybe you decided to move across the country (don’t look at me like that), start a blog/vlog, or enter a 30 day challenge to start a new 30 day challenge for the next 30 days. If you did that last one, props to you.

One of the things I’ve taken advantage of is an online course by Yale called The Science of Well-Being (which I will link to in the comments). It is their highest rated and most popular course offered, and it's currently free! So, I figured this was the perfect time to put some effort in and look at some changes I could make in my day-to-day for increased happiness. Since I have a strong following of entrepreneurs and people that want to get into real estate, I want to share a quick thought from the course that I believed to be relevant to you.

Back to mindset. There are two categories of mindsets that people generally fall into. The fixed mindset, and the growth mindset. A fixed mindset person generally feels that they are limited in their abilities and results by way of who they are, while a growth mindset person believes that with effort and perseverance, nearly anything can be achieved. Neuropsychology tells us that the fixed mindset is a bit of a fallacy, and in fact a growth mindset can be learned by anyone who is willing. When I was growing up, I was almost all fixed mindset. It wasn’t until my early 20's that I had a paradigm-shift and recognized that I was limiting myself in many ways just by how I thought about myself. To this day, sometimes it still takes work to fight off, but I know that anything I put hard work into I will get better at and there are no basic abilities that I’m born with. In a study (Blackwell et al 2007) just by telling students it was possible to get better at math with effort, they did. Just by teaching them to think that the hard work would pay off, it did!

Think about this as you challenge yourself in the future. How is your mindset affecting your results? Consider that just by increasing your effort you will increase your results- and maybe your happiness along the way.